Monday, 28 November 2011

An Uzbek news source is reporting that detained migrants in a remote centre in Russia are "emaciated, exhausted and unwell" from being fed only bread and water for months.

The same detention centre was investigated by the BBC in April. They found disturbing evidence of neglect, abuse, and overt racial discrimination by officials.

The detention centre is hundreds of miles from Moscow, in the northern Ural mountains.

“The immigrant workers are being taken off trains and brought to the detention centre ‘to ascertain their status’, but often this process lasts for months,” a well placed source employed in Uzbekistan’s penal system told Uznews.net, asking not to be identified.

The source said that those released from the centre fear "even more unpleasant consequences” if they speak out.

Uznews.net quotes a young man, Sodyk, saying that there were around 40 Uzbek workers who were emaciated, exhausted and unwell. Most were aged about 20 but looked much older. Many had had their passports taken away illegally by the local police.

“Every so often they would allow us to make a phone call but only to other parts of Russia,” Sodyk continued. “The food rations for the most part consisted of a piece of bread with water; for dinner they only gave us boiled water.”

The BBC report found refugees living in a collection of rotting mobile homes that had been used by East German labourers in the 1980s.

The buildings were falling apart. In the bathrooms, there were holes in the walls. Many of the rooms had buckets in the middle of the floor to catch the water dripping through electrical fittings in the ceilings. Most walls were warped with water damage.

The buildings were well insulated, but the residents said some bedrooms were bitterly cold when the temperature outside dropped to -30C.

The BBC reported racism directed at the Africans in the camp and locals shouting Nazi slogans at the refugees as they were being interviewed.

Russia's Federal Migration Service's official spokesperson was sacked after he told the BBC:

"What is now at stake is the survival of the white race. We feel this in Russia. We want to make sure the mixing of blood happens in the right way here, and not the way it has happened in Western Europe where the results have not been good"

1 comment:

I feel frosen to face this abominable situation of detention centres in Russia; it is the "Auschwitz" in 21th century. I cannot understand why such a spectacle happens in a member country of CoE. Russia has become a canser of Europe at last.